With an explosive growth in utilization of communication devices, mobile telecommunications carriers are seeing an exponential increase in network traffic. To meet the demands of higher traffic and/or improve the end user experience, conventional systems deploy metro cells (e.g., small cells) that improve network coverage and capacity by offloading mobile traffic between overlapping cells.
In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), intra-frequency cell reselection and equal priority inter-frequency cell reselection for a handover of a user equipment between overlapping cells can be optimized or improved by employing a cell reselection parameter, for example, Qoffset that specifies an offset between the two cells (e.g., serving cell and a neighbor cell). Specifically, conventional serving cells broadcast the Qoffset information for each of its neighbor cell in relation to the serving cell (e.g., offset between the serving cell and each neighbor cell). As the number of cells (e.g., metro cells) deployed within an area increases, the amount of Qoffset information that is to be transmitted significantly increases. For example, if the serving cell is a macro cell and there are twenty metro cells are within a coverage area of the macro cell, then the macro cell will broadcast at least twenty non-zero Qoffsets. This results in an increase in processing resources utilized by the serving cell and/or user equipment to which the Qoffset information has been transmitted. In addition, network traffic and/or resources utilized to facilitate the transmission are also significantly increased.